Hello everyone!
I have to admit that I changed my mind about the book I'll be reviewing tonight, seeing as I'm slowly working through the pile of left-overs I have which I started once upon a time, and then never actually finished.
The reasons for that vary, sometimes I simply needed a break from the book, sometimes it all turned south so I just needed to step away and figure out if I even wanted to continue, and sometimes I sort of just let it slide by the wayside ... until I decided it was time to stop that slide while I was at it.
Obviously I remember promising there would be the Sword of Destiny, but I'll get to that. It's one of those books I actually finished in one go.
Tonight, I'm tackling a story that sat there for almost a year since the last time I picked up the compilation of books, and that's saying something.
Then again I've realized that I have a few which I've just sort of left behind, and I don't feel right when that happens.
So for this week, we're returning to the pitch for a little bit, with Reaching First.
I've read and reviewed the previous two books in the series by Mindy Klasky, so you can easily find the links at the bottom of this blog post. Somehow, Perfect Pitch even got some of the most views on this blog, which is a BIG surprise. I would have thought it'd be one of the more popular, current books!
Not that I'm complaining.
It's also why I really wanted to finish off the omnibus of the three books I had.
Reaching First is the third one in that.
If you remember, the Diamond Brides series covers the stories of baseball players and the women who fall in love with them. It also gives us some insight into the game itself, though I found that aspect lacking in the third book, which focused mainly on the love story and not much else. Still, there IS baseball in these books, and for someone like me, who isn't from America that is, it's a fairly interesting side of things.
The story revolves around first baseman Tyler, who is traded at the beginning of the book (since he needs to get from his current club to the club we're following in the series) and who ends up in trouble while he's at it.
See, he's pissed about the trade, but he might have swallowed the bitter pill if not for the fact that some pencil pushers (he calls them that) in a bar call out one of his best friends and call him some other unflattering names, which flips the lid on this particular pot and Tyler ends up in a bar brawl, which results in him owing a hundred hours of community service.
This is how he ends up with Emily.
Emily used to work for a hospital before she was let off because of budget cuts, and with the death of her aunt she's tasked with turning her aunt's old home into some sort of center for military veterans and their families, but because all her suggestions were vetoed prior to the beginning of the book, she's running low on time to finish before the deadline in her aunt's will, and needs another pair of hands.
Unfortunately, in her mind at least, she gets Tyler, who she labels as 'dangerous' the minute he arrives.
She's also immediately attracted to him, but if you're reading a book with the cover you can see above, that's really not an issue unless you think it will be.
Anyway.
Tyler and Emily have a couple of rough starts until they find their rhythm and end up able to work together in transforming her house, but there's still a glaring problem: Tyler tends to duck out of certain duties which would require him to deal with documentation, paperwork of any kind, any kind of papers or writing or books, or anything really.
Why?
Well, because he can't read.
This is the premise that caught me on the book itself, because an adult, star athlete that can't read in this day and age? I was all in for it, and his plight is actually explained really well, how basically his other skills saved him so people often looked the other way, or how he learned to deal with the situation by developing an incredibly memory or responding to the circumstances around him, not the written word.
Unfortunately, since he doesn't tell Emily this secret, she's mad at him more often than not.
It doesn't stop her from developing a sort of relationship with him once he's off on the road and they talk every single night, despite the fact she tries to keep him at arms' length. It doesn't really work, and she welcomes him home super drunk one time, intent on sleeping with him to get rid of her own secret - she's still a virgin.
Tyler clocks in to just how drunk she is, though, and puts a stop to it that night, though they do eventually end up sleeping together. Unfortunately, she doesn't actually tell him she's a virgin then, either, and he figures it out during the course of action, so to speak, as it happens right after he shares his own biggest secret with her - namely, his I-can't-read one.
Considering the fact that earlier in the day he had defended her from a couple of high school bullies in a coffee shop, you can kind of see where he's coming from for being hurt that she wouldn't trust him, so he walks away.
He finishes his community service elsewhere and also visits his family back in his home town where his mother gives him some advice on how to get Emily back, while meanwhile Emily just barely escapes being sued for tangling with someone during community service and some other legal stuff on top of that.
The court hearing at the end of the service goes off well enough, and Tyler even reads his own statement with the help of a specialized computer that he was given after Emily recommended a professor to him who could maybe help him with his reading disorder. He then proceeds to go on his knee before Emily to ask her to marry him.
And she says yes - with all her dreams coming true since she'd finished the remodel, cleared the air with her aunt's lawyer (who actually loved her aunt and that's the reason he was so difficult), and with the community service now finished for Tyler, she can happily focus on a relationship.
Fin!
The book as a whole was a fast, easy read, and I was really intrigued by the male protagonist Tyler, who had a couple of quirks and of course his big secret about reading which made me want to read this in the first place. He was also charming, quick on his feet, and enough of a good guy to not take advantage of a woman who clearly wasn't exactly sober.
So he was lovely. My main issue with this one was Emily.
From the get-go, Emily decides that Tyler is a brawler and she wants nothing to do with him, which is how she treats him for most of the start of the book, while at the same time preaching how you should never judge someone without first getting to know them and their problems (based off the job she did before at the hospital). She somehow manages to make everything about herself no matter how much Tyler bends over backwards to accommodate her, but the icing on the cake is when she practically accuses Tyler of assaulting the guys who were being right assholes to her at the shop because she and him were having an argument.
The fact that Tyler didn't really assault anyone or that he helped get her out of an uncomfortable situation doesn't matter, apparently.
The most appalling thing however, at least for me, was right after Tyler shares he can't read with her, and she responds in her head by, and I quote, how much she loves him, and trusts him, and can't really tell him her secret because he's going to run away.
What now?
It made me mad later that TYLER was the one who ended up needing to apologize, when he'd really done nothing wrong. I'd been fairly okay with the book until things started going south because of Emily, and it's a shame because the rest of it was quite enjoyable.
I definitely need a break from this series after that though, and unfortunately this isn't the positive review I was hoping for when I first started reading the book.
xx
*image not mine
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